If you watch too much reality television, it’s easy to get a very jaded perspective on people. For instance, if you watch “The Bachelor” or “Millionaire Matchmaker” or even the old show, “Joe Millionaire,” it would be easy to make the assumption that all women are gold diggers and all men are only interested in sex. Okay, men are only interested in sex, but the whole gold digger thing is at least debatable.

It’s easy to see why men might think that women are only interested in money. Women need things—things that make no sense to men. In addition to the normal expenses, women usually spend a lot of money on clothes, hair care, and makeup, and every woman seems to have their particular items—their purses, their shoes, their jewelry—the thing that they will buy far too many of and pay far too much for. It only seems logical to a man that a woman would need another source of income to fuel her drug-like habit.

Do men make women into gold diggers?

To a man who truly loves women, a woman is a beautiful, mysterious, and wondrous being. She offers him beauty, compassion, and a host of other feminine qualities that he lacks. What can he offer back? A penis and the ability to open really stuck jars.

With this disparity, it’s no surprise that men feel the need to supplement their offer with cash. And they do. When a man is in a relationship with a woman, or trying to get into a relationship with a woman, he may find himself suddenly buying those clothes, shoes, and pieces of jewelry that a woman wants. Can you really call a woman a gold digger when all she’s doing is accepting the money and gifts a man insists on giving her?

How do traditional gender roles affect attitudes toward money?

Way back in ancient history, like the 1950s or so, the family dynamic was pretty simple. The man went out into the cruel, cruel world to make money and the woman stayed home, raised the kids, cleaned the house and drank like a quart of vodka a day. Since a “respectable” woman was not expected to have career aspirations, the only way a woman could be assured of a comfortable lifestyle was to find a man who was either very successful or who had the potential to be very successful.

Traditional gender behavior also established the pattern on dates wherein men pay for everything. While women aren’t exactly marching in the streets to protest this practice, it does add some strength to the perception that for women, it’s all about the money.

If not money, what else would make a woman stay with a man twice her age?

Perhaps no single situation makes onlookers scream “gold digger!” like the May/December romance. When you see that 20 year-old woman hanging on the arm of a 85 year-old, it’s hard not to wonder just how much money he is leaving for her in his will. You should probably stop thinking about it after that because your next thoughts will be about their sexual arrangements and that’s just creepy.

So why would a young woman be with a man so much older than her, if not for money? Well, there’s love. Stop laughing—it happens. Every now and then there is a woman who truly meets her soul mate and he just happens to be older than her grandfather.

Women in general do seem to be attracted to older men. Even beyond the financial, older men seem to represent safety and security to some women. In the case of extreme age differences, a woman may have unresolved issues with her father, or perhaps lost him at a young age, and seeks to resolve those issues by marrying someone who reminds her of him.

Is it logical to say that all women are gold diggers?

It turns out that the logic of the gold digger argument doesn’t hold water. There are far more poor men in the world than rich men, and they’re still married or in relationships. This means that there is either a majority of women who are not gold diggers or they’re very bad at the job.

There are also those women who pass up the opportunity to marry rich men. If the gold digger theory was accurate, there would be literally no woman on the planet who Bill Gates or Warren Buffet could not have. One has to believe that someone, somewhere, has turned them down.

For a variety of reasons, women have been painted as gold diggers throughout the years by society. This is inaccurate and illogical, on the whole, but for those who could be classified as gold diggers, one could make the argument that society pushed them into that role. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing—ugly, rich men need love, too.